was chosen as word of the year (Wang 2016) due to the notoriety it had achieved during the Brexit referendum and the US presidential election (Jankowski 2018), which resulted in the appearance of numerous publications from 2017 onwards (Table 1.1). Although mentions in the academic record dating back four decades have been localized, these studies were carried out sporadically. Proof of this is that up until 2012 one or two articles at the most appeared each year, which contrasts with the 179 new publications registered in 2019 alone, accounting for one third of the sample. The COVID-19 crisis has significantly influenced the level of production, continuously accelerating the various phases involved in publication, which is why it is foreseeable that at the end of 2020 the number of articles and publications registered will be higher than that achieved the previous year.
Table 1.1 Annual production indexed in WoS
| Year | Matches | % | Year | Matches | % | Year | Matches | % | ||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2020a | 151 | 28.2 | 2011 | 4 | 0.6 | 2002 | 2 | 0.4 | ||
| 2019 | 179 | 33.4 | 2010 | 4 | 0.7 | 2000 | 2 | 0.4 | ||
| 2018 | 97 | 18.1 | 2009 | 1 | 0.2 | 1999 | 1 | 0.2 | ||
| 2017 | 30 | 5.6 | 2008 | 2 | 0.4 | 1998 | 1 | 0.2 | ||
| 2016 | 13 | 2.4 | 2007 | 1 | 0.2 | 1997 | 1 | 0.2 | ||
| 2015 | 16 | 3.0 | 2006 | 2 | 0.4 | 1996 | 1 | 0.2 | ||
| 2014 | 9 | 1.7 | 2005 | 3 | 0.6 | 1992 | 1 | 0.2 | ||
| 2013 | 9 | 1.7 | 2005 | 3 | 0.6 | 1992 | 1 | 0.2 | ||
| 2013 | 9 | 1.7 | 2005 | 3 | 0.6 | 1992 | 1 | 0.2 | ||
| 2012 | 3 | 0.6 | 2003 | 1 | 0.2 | 1980 | 1 | 0.2 | ||
| aFrom January to August 2020. | ||||||||||
With respect to searching by concepts to determine their longevity, analysis of the texts indexed in WoS confirms that in 1980 the first article appeared that included the word “fact-check” in its title. It was published in the professional journal Columbia Journalism Review (Ridder 1980) and described and compared the work developed by fact-checkers in US newsrooms. In 1983 a newspaper chronicle by Robert Kaplan tackled disinformation in Greece in pioneering fashion in that same journal, and in the 1990s several authors analyzed the news coverage of AIDS, some of which was considered “deliberate misinformation” (Price and Hsu 1992; Bird 1996). However, “fake news,” currently the most widespread term of those analyzed, was not used until 2005 (Baym 2005). The texts that appear in this paragraph and other similar ones have been excluded from the qualitative analysis of this chapter as they lack an explicit methodology, but they must be mentioned because they show the existence of a historical debate within the journalistic profession on the veracity of content, although that concern has intensified and been addressed with greater scientific rigor more recently. The current stage has also favored the emergence of new concepts, such as “junk news,” which refers to sources that deliberately publish misleading, deceptive, or incorrect information packaged as real news (Bradshaw et al. 2020), or “news-ness,” the extent to which audiences characterize specific content as news (Edgerly and Vraga 2020).
In this context there is a predominance of articles with multiple authorship (70%), a decision that is probably justified by the complexity of the phenomenon and a multidisciplinary approach. This analysis makes it possible to compile the list of the most productive and reputed authors in this line of research, led by three women, Emily Vraga (13 articles), Leticia Bode (8), and Michelle Amazeen (7), followed by Lucas Graves, Michael Hameleers, Edson C. Tandoc Jr. (6), H. Lee, Richard Ling, and Chris Wells (5). In terms of affiliation, 14 universities account for a quarter of the entire production analyzed, with North American institutions occupying a dominant position. Outstanding in this respect is the University of Wisconsin, where the greatest number of articles registered in WoS (22) are generated, followed by the universities of Boston (15), Pennsylvania Commonwealth System of Higher Education, London (12), George Mason, Minnesota,
